1. The state is essentially benign – except the bits charged with protecting people from their neighbours, and the country from external enemies.

2. The rich are so slow-witted that they won’t find ways of avoiding higher tax rates.

3. An education system that has failed despite having untold billions lavished on it will succeed if only we spend more money on it.

4. That the theory of anthropocentric climate change, which scientists have proved themselves willing to lie and cheat to defend, is nevertheless self-evidently true.

5. The best people to run our liberal democracy are foreigners whom we don’t have a say in appointing, and whom we can’t remove.

6. A criminal who reoffends after serving a prison sentence wouldn’t have reoffended if he hadn’t been sent to prison.

7. The best way to improve the health-care system is to absolve nurses of the need to do any traditional nursing, while devolving that function to untrained third world immigrants.

8. The wearing of poppies to honour those who died for their country represents cultural fascism, while the wearing of burqas is an innocent expression of cultural identity.

9. Mainstream right-wing parties are sinister, anti-democratic conspiracies run by the most powerful elements in society – even though the best they can come up with are David Cameron and Mitt Romney!

10. The only mature, functioning democracy in the Middle East is self-evidently the source of all the region’s evils.

11. It’s the duty of Britain’s indigenous population to modfy its behaviour and beliefs to accommodate the alien cultures of any number of immigrant groups – rather than the other way round.

12. Competition is a very bad thing – unless, of course, you’re advancing your own career in the media or politics.

13. All businessmen are wicked – except those who espouse left-wing causes, who are saints.

14. The idea that those films and television programmes which upset traditional conservatives – full of graphic sex, bad language and attacks on the Christian religion – couldn’t possibly do any harm to anyone, whereas racist, sexist or classist epithets cause deep long-term psychological trauma.

15. Public sector workers deserve the sort of gold-plated pensions now unavailable to the private sector – despite, on average, earning more than private sector workers, and enjoying considerably greater security of tenure.

16. When it comes to higher education (as with immigration) “more” somehow must mean “better”.

17. Actors, rock stars and comedians have an important contribution to make to political discourse.

18. You can print money without causing inflation.

19. It’s perfectly acceptable to impose a poll tax on every British household to finance a media organisation which pumps out political propaganda which at least half of the British people don’t agree with.

20. When the country was brought to the brink of economic collapse by individuals, politicians and businesses behaving fecklessly, the people who need to be punished are those who were prudent enough to accumulate savings.

21. The only modern “art” worth subsidising is that which does dirt on the human spirit.

When it comes to the right to vote, I’ve always taken the view that it should be universal. But looking at how many miserably awful governments this country – and that other great democracy, the United States – haveelected over the past 50 years, I’m beginning to wonder whether we might not look at changing the rules.

When we vote, the most important factor in our choice is what portion of our earnings each party is going to take from us, and whether we approve of how it proposes spending it. There’s a whole bunch of other stuff, of course – but those are overwhelmingly the main factors.

Apart from the hard-core of left-wingers in our society – twenty percent? – you’d expect the vast majority of the rest of us to vote for whichever party was more likely to confiscate less of our money, and which would spend it on the kind of things sensible people actually care about (defence, policing, decent roads, effective border controls etc.).

The UK workforce is around 29 million strong, of which 20% (six million) work in the public sector (and, of those, around 10% are civil servants).

So, that’s six million people who are net recipients of public money – i.e. they get more money from the state than they pay back in taxes.

In addition – and almost unbelievably – 5,400,000 people are in receipt of unemployment benefits. (Included in this grotesque figure are 2.6m sick or disabled and 700,000 lone parents.)

That means 11,400,000 people are net recipients of public money. Essentially, 17.6m people in Britain are paying for themselves and 11.4m other people (and, obviously, getting some essential services in return – I’m not that blind to the need for centralised public spending).

The question is, wouldn’t it make sense for the ones doing all the paying to have a far greater say in who decides how much of their income is to be confiscated and how that money is to be spent?

The temptation must be intense for public sector workers and the close to 40% of adult Britons deriving their income from the public purse to vote for whichever party is promising to confiscate a greater percentage of private sector workers’ income and then spend it on public sector workers or benefits (when they aren’t in effect the same thing). Obviously, this temptation must be offset in many cases by political beliefs, a genuine interest in what’s good for the country, and how much more tax those in the public sector are likely to pay if a left-wing government comes to power.

But for the overwhelming majority of those benefits recipients who can be bothered to vote, asking them to vote Conservative must be like asking turkeys to give Christmas the thumbs-up.

Of course, these figures don’t account for the huge number of private sector workers engaged in public sector projects – construction, IT etc. Again, the temptation to vote for big spending governments must be strong (though, to be fair, all the major UK political parties seem to be addicted to big spending these days).

So, what would the political map of Britain look like if anyone earning the majority of their income from the state – and non-working spouses living in households dependent on public sector money – was denied the vote?

First, I presume the Tory Party would shift to the right. And it would win the next election outright. And it would go on winning until the economy was back in good shape.

There might be a waiver for those whose work requires them to risk their lives – the military, the police (well, the tiny percentage who actually leave their desks) and firemen.

If someone moved from the public to the private sector, their right to vote would depend on whether they had been a net contributor to the public purse since the last election.

The same rules would apply to local elections.

As for pensioners, I suppose we could do a quick tally of whether or not they were net contributors over the course of their working lives.

The person who tends to get overlooked amidst all the celebrations surrounding Private Eye’s half century is Christopher Booker. As far as I’m concerned he may just deserve the title of Greatest Living Englishman.

Famously ousted as editor of his own magazine in 1963 by Richard Ingrams (after which, as Booker delights in reminding everyone, circulation rapidly plummeted from 93,000 to 25,000) Booker has been part of the Eye’s joke-writing team for over 45 years since patching things up with Ingrams in 1965. He claims to have been responsible for more of the words published in Private Eye than any other writer.

Booker particularly hates trendy, modish obsessions – whenever there’s a particularly vicious piece parodying the latest nonsense being excreted by members of our liberal ruling establishment, I assume Booker’s responsible. In effect, he – along with Auberon Waugh – taught many of us who reached adulthood… Read more